Category Archives: Woolly Mammoths

Cooking, Friends, The Move, Woolly Mammoths

Rich in History and Rich in Memory

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Samain                                                                               Closing Moon

Lunch today with Ode, discussing a brochure, a sales book for our house at the Birchwood Cafe. Dinner tonight with Tom, Roxann and Kate at Cafe Zentral. Each of these moments, extending friendships, adding to the years of time together, and in that sense not all that remarkable, are nonetheless remarkable. And poignant.

At lunch today Ode passed me as he came to sit down, placed his hand a moment on my shoulder. In that brief touch was twenty-five years of shared history, of knowing each other. We ate, spoke of our move to Conifer-“This is really happening,” he said.-his upcoming long trip to France with Elizabeth, about the cutting boards he was making of exotic woods. Then, we discussed which pictures, what words, might help that one person or couple see our property as their next home. And we were done.

Kate and I came early to Cafe Zentral, a relatively new restaurant at 5th and Marquette in the old Soo Line Building. The blue line runs beside it, on its way out to the airport and the Mall of America, on the way back to Target Field where the Twins play.

This place is dim, in the way that upper end restaurants often are. The food was excellent and continued that trend I’ve experienced elsewhere. That is, you get less food as you pay more for it. Gotta be one of the few products for which that’s the case.

It was not the food though, not the restaurant, not the blue line or the downtown location, but the friends. Tom and I have been Woolly Mammoths exactly the same length of time. We were initiated at Valhelga together, a year or so after the Mammoths came into existence.

Again, we spoke of this and that, but even the content of the words was not so much the point, but the being together, the being seen by each other, the acknowledging of those years, the now long years we’ve known each other.

So today I am a rich man. Rich in friends and in history. And able, thanks to long years of analysis, to say good-bye and retain these friendships. To see the parting not as final, not as abandonment, but as the closing of a chapter, the end of a period of time. I’m grateful to all these friends who value me enough to say farewell.

 

Colorado, Friends, The Move, Woolly Mammoths

Counting Down

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Fall                                                                                    New (Samain) Moon

photoR

The Woolly meetings count down, now 2, November and December. Tonight a writing teacher came, courtesy of Charlie Haislet. We met in the casual room of the University Club, that quirky brick and ivy place where Summit curves north toward the cathedral and the state capitol.

We wrote, sharing pieces of our lives, not pieces held back necessarily, but pieces discovered in the writing and new then to the rest. It was a warm and loving meeting, for men of our age perhaps unusual, at least among the white educated demographic from which we all come.

I needed this immersion among my friends, my brothers because the week has been strenuous, even stressful. Yet, the time also points up the loss, heightens the foreground/background shifting of life now. Minnesota/Colorado. Colorado/Minnesota. In the mountains, on the Midwest.

When I drove down Highway 10 tonight, a point came where one sign indicated Minneapolis and the other St. Paul. Tonight I chose the left hand path since my destination was St. Paul. But, in a way that fork in the road sums up the last twenty years, living now north of two cities in which I have lived and places I love, going sometimes to this one and sometimes that.

The uncertainty of the mortgage underwriter decision process drains the joy out of this time for me and I look forward to knowing whether we will be able to proceed or not. If not, it’s back to the looking process. If so, it’s hop in the truck next week, canned goods and a computer onboard, an air mattress, a picnic set for dining at the new place, a bedroll. Signing documents here and there, talking to fencing contractors. Getting the new place turning toward our life.

Colorado, Friends, The Move, Woolly Mammoths

End Times

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Fall                                                                               Falling Leaves Moon

Maybe I’ll look back a year from now, from somewhere high in the Rockies when the sky hits mountain blue and the cirrus mimic the tails of nearby horses, maybe I’ll look back and remember this day. 62, sunny, blue skies with high wispy cirrus clouds and leaves just starting to turn. And a drive east toward Stillwater, toward the St. Croix, with the intention of lunch with Bill Schmidt at the Gasthaus Bavarian Hunter, but finding it full, going to Sal’s Angus Grill, a biker bar in Whitworth. Whitworth? An intersection, near as I can tell, with a huge ballroom and Sal’s, the whole town.

The drive from here took me east through the northern reaches of the Twin Cities exurbs, across Anoka County with its sod farms and nurseries, lakes and marshes and forest, then across Washington County with its expensive country estates, more marsh and lakes and plenty of cute decorations for Halloween. It was an hour so of ambling through the very southern end of the Boreal Forest, seeing the blue-black lakes reflecting back the sky, choppy with light winds. A lot of other folks out, too, just driving, seeing an October wonder day.

Bill invited me to lunch and I picked the spot since he was driving on from there to see the color along the St. Croix, something he and his late wife, Regina, would often do, meandering as the day took them. That’s how we ended up at Sal’s, wandering north from the Gasthaus. We ate, talked about the move to Colorado, his family, but mostly we affirmed our now long friendship, passing an October lunch with each other.

And so the end times have begun. I expect no rapture, no bugles, no seals breaking, no anti-Christ rising but I do anticipate moving from this place, my home for over 40 years. With that move so much will become past. The Gasthaus. An easy lunch with a friend of many years. Access on a whim to houses and neighborhoods where I’ve lived or where Kate lived. The cultural riches here: the Guthrie, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra and the MIA especially. Those early years in medical practice for Kate. All of my ministry. Raising kids time. All that will become more past than now since their physical context will be far away.

The end times, at least the Christian version, is followed by that great wakin’ up morning when the dead rise from their graves. So too it will be with us following the end times here, a whole new life will rise from the ashes of this one. I look forward to it.

Memories, Minnesota, Woolly Mammoths

Memories

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Fall                                                                                     Falling Leaves Moon

Tom Crane, Bill Schmidt, Scott Simpson, Mark Odegard and Frank Broderick and I gathered at the Black Forest for the Woolly Mammoth first Monday restaurant meeting. We had gone to the Black Forest regularly for many years, then, partly at my urging, had moved onto other cuisines and other locales. Now, though, as my time here has become limited I find myself wanting to return to familiar places.

The Whittier Neighborhood was the site of my year-long internship while in seminary-part at Bethlehem-Stewart Presbyterian (only two blocks west of the Black Forest on 26th) and part at South Central Ministry just across Lake Street from Whittier in the Longfellow Neighborhood. In 1976 the Presbyterian church ordained me to the ministry of word and sacrament at Bethlehem-Stewart, an ordination I held until 1996 when, in Phoenix, Arizona at the Unitarian-Universalist General Assembly, I entered the U-U ministry.

So a lot of person history intersects at the corner of 26th and Nicollet, where the Black Forest is. Not far from there toward the north and east three blocks, too, is the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. A nexus for me in many ways.

Frank’s back from Ireland, looking much better and feeling no pain in his legs. Tom’s hand has mostly healed. Mark and Elizabeth have decided to spend three months  or so in southern France, staring mid-January. Scott admitted he had spent time in his youth a mail-man substitute. And worked as a Lamplighter while sleeping in People’s Park in Vancouver, B.C. Bill Schmidt’s becoming Spinozified and finding this Dutch Jew a very compatible thinker.

On the drive home, a drive I’ve made more or less regularly from Minneapolis or St. Paul to Andover for the last 20 years, I realized that though I spent 20 years in the city and consider myself an urban guy, I’ve really only spent 20 years in cities. The other 47 years have been in smaller to medium sized towns or the far burbs. Interesting how a place can impress itself into our sense of who we are.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Woolly Mammoths

Rising

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Fall                                                                                       New (Falling Leaves) Moon

The prototype of the evil doer, the mother of all James Bond’s enemies and role model for purist tyrants of all stripes, Adolf Hitler, still shines with a dark light, casting a pall of sickness over the future. Of course, even Hitler represents a distillation of a much deeper human problem, that of denigration based on secondary characteristics: racism, anti-semitism, misogyny, nativism.

In Hitler’s case a centuries old virus, a plague in the soil of Europe, a virulent stream of racism, anti-semitism, found its perfect host. Hitler glorified the notion of racial purity over against its worst violation, blood pollution, and found reason to kill Jews, gays, Gypsies and the mentally disabled.

This is not news. Except it is if you’re Jewish and living in Europe. Or, Jewish and living anywhere in the world, even here in the United States. Here’s a paragraph from a NYT article published today:

“From the immigrant enclaves of the Parisian suburbs to the drizzly bureaucratic city of Brussels to the industrial heartland of Germany, Europe’s old demon returned this summer. “Death to the Jews!” shouted protesters at pro-Palestinian rallies in Belgium and France. “Gas the Jews!” yelled marchers at a similar protest in Germany.”

Though not Jewish myself I count many Jews as my friends. My wife, my daughter-in-law and both grandchildren are Jewish. So, I ask all my fellow goyim to say, along with the Jews, “Never again.”

Aging, Friends, Health, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

How Can We Live Until We Die?

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Lughnasa                                                                    College Moon

After taking a rug into American Rug Laundry in Minneapolis, I drove back through the campus of the University of Minnesota. It was move in day. Trucks with back doors thrown open, mattresses being handled through door-ways.  Clutches of stunned looking freshmen, on campus and on their own, gathered at street lights. Now what?

It felt good to see that moment, relive my own and feel renewed as a cultural ritual continues, looking much the same as when I did it myself back in 1965.

That was the morning. In the late afternoon I drove over to Maple Grove, to Biaggi’s and met Tom Crane, Bill Schmidt and Warren Wolfe for our Woolly first Monday restaurant meal.

Warren closed on the sale of his second house in Minnesota last Friday and was in a celebratory mood. Bill had come from playing cards with friends, happy to be. Tom had an off work weekend beard and spoke of cleaning the garage floor in anticipation of guests soon to arrive.

The ease of our conversation, the common reference points, so many now, was in its fluidity, healing. (not, I should say, from recent pain or anguish, but from the deeper burden of life lived fundamentally alone) Seeing and being seen is the essence of human interaction yet it is so often blurred by wanting something from the other, or anticipating something else. This evening, as so often with the Woollys (though not always), we were with each other, there, at that table.

One profound question arose, how can we live until we die? This dips into the existential reality of bodies going infirm-Warren and I have glaucoma, Tom’s thumb, Frank’s heart and back, Ode’s knee. It also, and I think more profoundly, raises the question of self-hood, of what makes us who we are. What is necessary? Is walking necessary? Sight? The lack of serious, even terminal illness? What is indispensable?

Perhaps a clue came to us in the person of Cheryl, our waitress. When she drove north from Santa Rosa to San Francisco to see her father, she would drive through Gilroy, the garlic capital of the U.S. She wound crank her windows down and enjoy the aroma. Some of her friends thought her eccentric. No, she was Cheryl, taking in what she could as she had the opportunity.

That is, I would guess, a secret to living until we die.

 

Colorado, The Move, Woolly Mammoths

Leave Taking

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Lughnasa                                                              Lughnasa Moon

Last night was a good example of what I’ll miss. Where will I learn about Flogging Molly? Who will want to play Rodrigo and the first movement of Appalachian Spring so I can appreciate their appreciation of them?

(Rodrigo monument in Aranjuez, Spain)

It was a sweet evening. And it started around a meat loaf, with ketchup squirted on top, ears of corn boiled and slathered with butter, roasted potatoes, a garden salad. This is Midwestern comfort food at its zenith, the ne plus ultra of small town supper tables. Cooked by Ode who said, “I like to cook. Have everything come out at the same time.”

These men. I’ve been with them so long. They know my stories and I know theirs. We want to know what each other listen to. Not to judge it, but to absorb it. It becomes part of our knowledge of each other, broadening our tastes as we deepen our understanding. Sort of like a book club only better.

These meetings are once a month and where once they stretched on to the horizon, now they have a terminus. Each one counts down, moving toward my last, at least my last as a Minnesota resident.

In more settled times, where moving on meant having the carpenter make a pine box, the preacher give a sermon and the gravedigger complete the work, this kind of leave taking most often happened unawares. One moment you were here and then either suddenly or after a brief illness, you were not. Unawares and remarked by rituals of leave taking, the pilgrim gone on ahead.

In this instance though the leave-taking stretches out and even after there will be the right of return. Not final, at least not yet.

Music, Woolly Mammoths

Woolly Audio

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Got home tonight after listening to Woolly Mammoths play their current audio favs. Looked up in the night sky, around Cassiopeia to the north, and saw a satellite tracking fast against the Milky Way. A moment of foreground/background confusion. Here I am on earth, up there, in space is a human made object. Here. There. Sort of like anticipating the move. Here. There.

(most likely this one, Envisat, a defunct European Space Agency Earth observatory)

Mark Odegard asked us to bring material we’ve been listening to recently. Frank Broderick played Rodrigo (a classical guitar composition), the last movement of Tchaikovsky’s 6th and a recorded version of him singing a Kris Kristofferson song. This was for Mary in case he died during surgery.

Bill Schmidt had a clip from Krista Tippet interviewing Paul Cohelo and a track of Dave Brubeck. Stefan played an Indian music selection and two videos produced and sung by his son Taylor. Warren had Leo Kottke and Flogging Molly, an Irish punk band. Scott played the first movement of Appalachian Spring. Tom played Izzy, the Hawai’ian singer, and Kathleen Madigan. I didn’t catch Mark’s selection, but it was moody guitar music.

(Flogging Molly)

I played Dylan singing It Ain’t Me Babe and Willie Nelson, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys. Packing music.

Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

Boys and their Tractors

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

Into St. Paul this morning for another America Votes meeting at the Minnesota Nurses Association. Solid, information packed as usual.

On the way in I listened to a radio discussion of masculinity and on the way back an Ira Flatow Science Friday story on regenerative farming. NPR is listening to my brain.

Men in America has its main hook in the changes since the 1970’s in men and women’s education status. Women have pushed ahead of men, or girls ahead of boys steadily, until today girls dominate boys in all of the academic disciplines through high school. While in itself this is neither alarming or surprising, when joined to the decline in manual labor and other manufacturing jobs, a disturbing picture emerges. Men begin to look left behind in the contemporary labor market. There are a lot more matters to discuss here. Another time.

Regenerative farming pushes forward the no-till farming movement, moving beyond merely sustainable agriculture to an agriculture that positively enhances the soil. In this show a number from the book The Soil Will Save Us by Kristin Ohlson got my attention. She says that if 11% of the worlds agricultural land were to convert to no-till farming the resulting natural sequestration of carbon dioxide would balance the climate change equation. Don’t know if this is true, but it’s intriguing.

It took me immediately to rain follows the plough which I mentioned here not far back. That was the belief that created the vast agricultural lands of the plains where industrial agriculture has combined with center pivot irrigation to drain the Ogallala aquifer and destroy the once ten foot deep top soil created by prairie plants. If that land were to convert to no-till agriculture, water use would plummet and the plains could begin to heal themselves. Might be the 11% right there.

Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Breakfast

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Lughnasa                                                             Lughnasa Moon

Breakfast with friend and Woolly Mark Odegard. While waiting for him at Keys (I was early.), I noticed many pairs sitting in booths, usually two women across from each other, but men, too. 8:30 on a weekday. Friends having breakfast, I imagined. It was good to see human connection, thriving.

Mark’s back from Voyageur’s National Park and a houseboat week on Rainy Lake. He’s also reproducing one of his visual journals, his idiosyncratic artform, for folks he and Elizabeth house sat for last January. Mark’s always got one design project or another underway or about to be underway.

Lunch with Margaret, then breakfast with Mark. A busy social calendar in my world. And the potential for even this many times with friends will diminish after the move. I’ll have to get at something out there.